Bali painting fetches momentous price Wed, 07 Apr 2010

An oil painting done in 1960 by Lee Man Fong has sold for $3.3 million US at an auction in Hong Kong, marking one of the highest prices ever paid for a contemporary work from Southeast Asia.

The two-metre-long Bali Life features a bucolic scene of islanders resting.

Bali Life "is one of the outstanding examples in Lee's acclaimed Balinese series," Mok Kim Chuan, head of Sotheby's Southeast Asian Paintings, told the Jakarta Globe newspaper.

Lee was born in Guangzhou, China, in 1913 and moved to Indonesia as young man. He died in 1988.

The purchase is also notable because it could signal the rebound of the Asian art market, which had been seeing record prices for modern works from China prior to the world economic meltdown.

"Don't be surprised to see prices match or even beat pre-crisis levels very soon," said Eric Huang, a Taipei-based buyer and dealer, told Bloomberg News.

The record for Asian contemporary art was set in May 2008, just prior to the U.S. credit crisis. Zeng Fanzhi's painting of Red Guards, Mask Series 1996 No. 6, sold for $9.5 million US in Hong Kong.